Heinz Blumenfeld, born on February 25, 1914, in Hannover, was the oldest child of Julius Blumenfeld and Dina née Heiser. Edel Sheridan-Quantz of the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage in Hannover provided the first information about the date of birth and wrote that Heinz is registered as JAKOB Heinz on the family registration card.¹ Most of the information I have about Heinz comes from his file in the Israeli State Archives.² According to these documents, he entered Palestine on September 8, 1936.

Heinz arrived in Haifa, Israel on board the “SS Patria” together with his wife Sara.³ In April 1939, Heinz Blumenfeld submitted his application for naturalization for himself and his wife Sara Ita, née Wulfsohn. Sara was born on December 15, 1908 in Liepaja, Latvia. The pixelated photos of Heinz and Sara come from their naturalization documents. The couple was naturalized on May 8, 1939. At that time, Heinz and Sara lived in Haifa at 43 Jaffa Street c/o Beigelmann. Heinz listed his occupation as “laborer.”

My cousin Steven Bloomfield writes: “Heinz was apparently never very happy […] He couldn’t really settle in Palestine. […] Ilse [Blumenfeld Stein, Heinz’s sister] said that he had made a poor living as a baker. She said that [his wife] had cheated him out of all his money, after which he suffered some kind of breakdown and soon died in utter despair. After his death, Ilse traveled to Israel to settle his estate. Ilse said that he had become an alcoholic, and that the alcohol had killed him.

“Heinz visited New York City once. That was during the 1964 World’s Fair. He stayed with Ilse and Mo in Inwood (Thayer Street in Upper Manhattan). Erika Tuchmann Bloomfield [wife of his brother Werner] said that during his visit, Heinz was chronically late for almost every appointment he had; Erika and Werner lived in Kew Gardens, Queens and arranged various meetings with Heinz around the city. He was regularly an hour late or more.”⁴

On the Gravez.me website, I was able to find the grave of Heinz Blumenfeld. The name on the gravestone is Jakob Heinz Blumenfeld. The year of birth (1914) and the name of the father (Julius) match the information I was looking for. Therefore, I assume that Heinz Blumenfeld died in Tel Aviv, Israel on March 23, 1976 and is buried in the Holon Cemetery, Tel Aviv South.⁵

1. Email from Dr. Edel Sheridan-Quantz, Zentrale Angelegenheiten Kultur, ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage to the author, March 21, 2022. ↩︎
2. Israel State Archives, Immigration Authority, Government of Israel, Applications for Citizenship, Heinz Blumenfeld. ↩︎
3. היינץ בלומנפלד, in: Israel, Immigration Lists, myheritage.ch. ↩︎
4. Email from Steven Bloomfield to the author, January 14, 2021. ↩︎
5. GRAVEZ, https://gravez.me/en/deceased/2952A949-CE76-4E50-A313-2E9FDD1CCD02. ↩︎